Leviathan is a weird and arresting documentary about commercial fishing in
Massachusetts – prepare for an extraordinary offshore odyssey, says Tim
Robey

“Luca Brasi sleeps with the fishes”, we were told in The Godfather. Well, here’s how he might have felt – sleeping with them, sloshing around with them, becoming one with them. This extraordinarily weird and arresting film is a documentary of sorts – it was entirely shot on a fishing trawler off the Massachusetts coast, mostly at night.

But it’s really a radical experiment in non-fiction cinema – not seeking to enlighten or inform, but to disorientate us, practically to drown us, in a nightmare vision of the ocean’s power.

There are almost no spoken words, except the banal ones coming from a Discovery Channel documentary, which one of the crew is watching as he nods off. The fishermen we see do speak to each other, but their dialogue comes out as a muffled series of grunts. We hear instead the infernal clanking of their machines, and the enveloping roar of the wind and waves.

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Cables for their nets pay out with deafening friction, looking like slimy tendrils snaking into the dark. The film, which has no narrative as we’d conventionally understand it, isn’t seeking any form of pure realism, but a kind of alien heightening of this universe through every means the directors can find.

They used 20 tiny cameras, most attached to the fishermen’s helmets, some thrown overboard in waterproof containers, where they bob and duck on the surface, catching glimpses of seagulls overhead.

Sushi afterwards may not appeal. The cameras slide around on deck so that the bulging eyes of dead fish, in their hundreds, fill our vision. At one point, a water bird lands, snuffling its way towards this food, and tries to hoist itself over a wooden barrier to get at them. For long moments, the camera practically strokes its sodden feathers. You watch these sequences wondering what delight they’d inspire in Werner Herzog, whose interest in the planet’s ugliest creatures is well-known.

The end credits, which refuse to discriminate between the human, avian and piscine cast, are another clue to the film’s levelling intent – even the moon (“Luna”) gets a mention, while Paralichthys Dentatus, whatever that is, sits directly above Paul Henner, whoever or whatever that is. There’s something extra-terrestrial about this project – literally so, since it’s an offshore odyssey, but also in the sense of not being recognisably of this Earth.

It makes you grapple with a paradox. Never has something as everyday as commercial fishing been made to seem so foreign to our gaze, but also like such a primordial plunge into the basics of meat and sinew.

It’s a rendezvous, not with all things bright and beautiful, but with all things gooey and frightful.